Chapter 4 #3
"That's —" Hollis stopped, because it was, it was exactly what he did, he'd been running the arithmetic since Roan first opened his mouth in that hall, trying to work out what it would cost him to owe this, and there was no answer that didn't frighten him.
"That's your world you just stood up against. Those are the people who pay you. "
"Those are the people who pay me," Roan agreed.
"I've moved a hundred boats into a hundred marinas exactly like the one Sutter's selling.
I know precisely how the trick works, because I've been the man who tied the trophy up at the pretty end of it and took the check and left.
" He said it flat, and there was something down under the flatness that Hollis couldn't get his light into.
"So. Yeah. That was mine." He looked over. "I picked yours."
Hollis didn't have anything to set against that.
His whole life the traffic had run one direction — people arrived with the heavy thing and left him holding it — and here was a man who'd arrived with nothing and would be gone by fall, spending the one thing he owned, which was knowing exactly how the world that paid him worked, and handing it over like a tool.
It fit no slot Hollis had. He kept trying to price it and the number kept coming back wrong.
"Why," Hollis said finally. It was the only honest question he had left. "You don't splash for weeks. You could keep your head down, do your work, take your boat, and never lay eyes on one of these people again. Why stand up in there."
Roan was quiet a moment, and when he answered it wasn't quite an answer, which Hollis was learning was how the man told the truth.
"Because I've spent seven years being the guy who ties the trophy up and takes the check and leaves," he said.
"And somewhere back there I got tired of only ever being on the leaving end of a thing.
" He watched the dark water. "You build something for twenty years.
I move other men's boats and own a hole in the water.
I don't know. It was good to stand next to a man who made something and get to say out loud that it was worth keeping.
" A beat. "Even if it's not mine to keep. "
They'd stopped walking. Hollis didn't remember stopping.
They were at the head of the yard where the gravel met the first of the stands, in the dark, and Roan was close — closer than the path made him be, close enough that Hollis could see the harbor lights caught in his pale eyes, and the man wasn't reading the exits.
For the first time since he'd come around the point, Roan Mercer was standing still in a place with the whole open ocean at his back and not once looking at the way out of it.
Something in Hollis — some plank sprung and swollen and wet for twenty years — chose that exact moment to come fair.
"Roan," he said. Just the name. He'd never once said it out loud, he realized, all week, and it came up out of him like a fastening pried loose.
Roan's breath went unsteady. He swayed in, an inch, the way a boat leans to a gust, and Hollis felt his own ruined hand come up off his side without a word of instruction, felt himself begin to lean down into the little distance that was left, and the whole harbor held itself at the top of the tide the way it does in the half a minute before it turns —
The pay phone bolted to the co-op wall thirty feet off started ringing.
It was the loudest thing in the world. A relic, that phone, kept alive for the boats whose radios died out on the water, and it rang like something out of another century, harsh and endless, and both of them came off the moment like men stepping back off a rail.
Roan turned toward it on reflex — a phone ringing in the dark by the water is a boat in trouble, and a man who'd spent his life out there couldn't not turn — and by the time he'd turned back the inch had gone to a yard and the tide had turned and slipped quietly out, and the almost of it hung between them in the cold air, unspent.
"I should —" Roan started.
"Somebody's boat," Hollis agreed, rough, and stepped back, and handed the man the out he was already reaching for, because handing people the thing they were reaching for was the only way Hollis had ever learned to love anybody, even when the thing they reached for was away from him.
Roan went to answer the phone. Hollis stood in the dark yard with his hand still half-raised, and lowered it slow, and watched the water go out, and understood two things at once with the clean cold clarity of a man reading his own hull for the first time in a long time.
The first was that he wanted this. Wanted it with his whole weight behind it, in a way he'd spent two decades refusing to want anything at all.
The second was that the man he wanted would be gone before the leaves — because Hollis had watched him tie up trophies at a hundred marinas and sail away from every one, and there was not one reason on God's earth to think Hollis Cyr would be the harbor that finally taught a storm bird to land.
He picked up a boat stand that didn't need moving, and moved it, because his hands had to do something, and the wanting had nowhere else to go.